Mekong Marathon Tour Day 1
Trip Start
Jun 21, 2007
1
11
20
Trip End
Jul 22, 2007
Mekong Delta, Vietnam
Friday, July 6, 2007
As we progressed, the river turned black. We went under a bridge and still the shantytown continued. Suddenly, we reached a fork, and across the river from the shacks lay modern mansions, their propery lined with deck chairs facing the garbage-strewn water. It was incredible to witness such opulance within meters of extreme poverty. In Vietnam it's fairly common to see large beautiful homes sitting among shacks and street dwellers
01. Shanty Swimmer
. The motor began to sputter. Our driver said plastic garbage had messed up the motor. We sat and waited as a crew member dove underwater to try to fix the motor. The driver stood on top, enjoying the air. Troy stepped out and I took over as driver for a moment of power.
The boat was busted so we docked nearby, walked through a home - which doubled as a gas station - finding ourselves on a narrow road in the middle of a small town. We were told that a bus would be called and that we could look around as we waited. Tourists were a rare occurance here, and residents gathered to watch us pass by, much like movies about the Old West, in which shutters and doors slammed shut when The Stranger walked into town. These folks didn't exactly hide, but they were curious and wary.
We waited for a couple of hours until our guide appeared. He told us we had to walk to the bus, as it wouldn't fit over the bridge leading to the town. We met our guide on the sweet relief of the airconditioned bus. We drove to our second boat, which we took to tour the Mekong. We visited several islands, which we named ourselves. We stopped at Ben Tre Island (Restaurant Island) for lunch, where we saw a grove of palm-covered tourist eateries
02. Lifstyles of the Rich and Proud
. The specialty was an entire fish deepfried and elegantly presented on two poles. On to Unicorn Island (Candy Island). Our first stop was the honey factory, where we saw an actual hive. We sat down for honey tea and were treated to candied fruits samples. What a surprise to find these were samples of actual items we could buy for our own! We toasted with rice wine and banana wine, counting to three in Vietnamese, followed with a "Yo!" and down the hatch.
Among the sale items were candies, honey, and the best offer, ROYAL JELLY. They had a special deal on Unicorn Island that day: 3 bottles of ROYAL JELLY for $25 or spend $30 dollars and they'd throw in a complementary bag of candy (which, bought seperately, cost $1).
Next we walked down a lane lined with stores selling Vietnamese trinkets. The lane lead to a resting spot where we enjoyed a treat of fresh fruit and traditional music, sung by two smiling women. There was one instrument Troy and I found interesting, which had one string, a "wa wa" stick, and was played with a toothpick. The guy who played this allowed us to try it
after they'd finished their set
03. I take over (break the boat)
. Playing it was much more difficult than it appeared. Go look up the name of this instrument and get back to us, will you?We ended Unicorn Island in a line of canoes, which felt very much like a Disney ride. The 10 minute ride was through a narrow passage lined with lush foliage. We met our tour boat, and took this boat to our tour bus for another three hours. We suddenly stopped on the side of the highway - everyone out! We crossed the highway, went into some random house, passing a man watching TV, walked through his back door into an attached recycling warehouse, walked out that back door, passing a squatting family and a girl bathing in the river (they bathe with their clothes on, so put your eyeballs back into their sockets), to a waiting boat. This series of events so most surreal we sat dazed for a few
moments on the boat before turning to eachother and asking what had just happened.
This boat took us to Can Tho, Vietnam's "most cosmopolitan city". A neon sign advertising latex matresses flashed above the shacks across the river from Can Tho. We dropped off other tourists at their hotels. We had opted to do a home stay so we carried our bags through the city to the final hotel, where, at the back door, waited our cyclo driver
04. High Noon
. He drove us for about half an hour through and beyond the city as we wondered where we would end up. Would it be an apartment? A river shack? It sprinkled. Our driver dropped us off at a canoe waiting in the dark. A spritely Vietnamese woman sat us in the canoe and immediately began teaching us random Vietnamese words such as mango, hat, eyes, nose, mouth, backpack, among others. We rode through dark waters, the only source of light a flashlight held by the driver and the fireflies hanging lazily in the palms. When we stopped, our teacher's last word was good-bye.
We climbed ashore with our bags and were lead by flashlight along a mud trail and over a couple of tree branch bridges to a house where an amazing dinner was waiting. We ate, drank rice wine and shared traveling tales with six other tourists before retiring to our hut, where we slept under a mosquito net on a bamboo mat on a wooden bed, falling asleep to the sounds of the night insects.
